Happy St. Urho’s Day (a little late but whatever)! In honor of St. Urho I give you this picture of a chicken sitting on a goat sitting on a dog crate with another goat inside. I’m not sure why it would honor St. Urho but it was a picture that had to be shared and today is the perfect day for sharing it. Oh, and Happy St. Patrick’s Day for our Irish readers.
In other farm related news, we are still selling shares of everything we sell (Veggies, Meat, Cheese, Fruit, Eggs, Coffee, Seafood, Ice Cream, Herbs and Bread). You can also check out the online store for all the delicious goodness. And tell your friends!
Payment for veggie shares is due this month unless you made other arrangements. Payment for other shares is due in May. Let me know if you have any questions.
Recipes: One of my goals every year is to provide people with recipes that use the various items we provide. I feel the people who are most successful and happy with their CSA share are those who have figured out a set of go-to recipes they use and enjoy season after season. I know we have our favorites we can’t wait to have again when the season is right. Hopefully you are the same, and if not, I’d like to find ways to help you get there.
If you have recipes you would like to share with other farm members please send them my way. I will load them into our online recipe file. If you have links to recipes you use and are willing to “pin” them on our Pinterest boards please let me know and I will invite you to be a contributor or just send the links to me and I will pin them. Let’s all work on the C part of CSA!
Farm News: Not much to report other than greenhouse planting. We have all the alliums (onions, shallots, leeks) planted; the brassicas that are single plantings (e.g. Brussels sprouts, cabbage, etc.) as well as the first succession of broccoli and cauliflower; the celery and celeriac are seeded; and so is the first planting of beets. There may be a few other things I forgot, but in any case the greenhouse is starting to fill up. Coming up soon will be lettuce, hot peppers, and kohlrabi.
We have a few new things we are trying this season. First we are trialing a couple new broccoli varieties. The one’s we’ve grown in the past have worked out well but it doesn’t hurt to give a few others a try. We are trying a new Brussels Sprouts variety because the one we used last year no longer seems available. Typical in the seed business. The same goes for one of our carrot varieties. We have a new eggplant we are trying this season. We’ve been looking for an eggplant that will complement Orient Express, which seems to give a big flush of early eggplants then just grows without producing a lot more fruit. Having another variety that comes later would allow us to give out eggplants over a longer period of time, something everyone wants right?
We have a new romaine lettuce variety because the one we had last year is no longer available. Same for our red onions. We’re going to plant more okra! Hopefully some of you like okra. Everyone said they wanted more radishes, that we didn’t give out enough radishes last season so we purchased watermelon radish seeds. Ok, the first part of that last sentence isn’t true but we thought we’d try the watermelon radishes anyway. That’s what we do when someone asks us to grow something they like.
We’re trying a new yellow zucchini. I haven’t found a good yellow zucchini ever. Hopefully this one will work. We’ve also switched up our potato offering this year due to the blight we encountered last season. This year our line up is Red Norlands, Russet Norkotah, Yukon Gold, Nicola, La Ratte, German Butterball, Kennebec and Desiree. We’ve added a few more flower varieties to our FlowerShare.
Finally we have a few new heirloom tomatoes we are trying: Big Yellow Zebra and Black Beauty. Black Beauty is a really dark, dark purple tomato. If it looks anything like the picture it should be quite a sight. I’m not sure what attracted me to the Big Yellow Zebra. Hopefully it will be as tasty as the green zebra only bigger and yellow. Oh, and we will reintroduce one of my all-time favorite tomatoes that we haven’t planted in a few years, the Orange Oxheart!
Wait, I forgot about the hot peppers! For those of you who like it really hot we purchased some Trinidad Scorpion pepper seeds. They are supposedly hotter than ghost peppers. Maybe we need to have a hot pepper eating contest! We’re also growing Tabasco peppers, buena mulate peppers — a pepper that turns from purple to pink to yellow to orange to brown to dark red — and grandpa’s home pepper — a cool season pepper just in case global warming takes a break this year.
I think that covers it for new stuff this year. Feel free to contact me with any questions, suggestions, jokes or other farm related information. And hopefully you all wore purple on St. Urho’s Day!